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mechanism, she turned back to Valentin.
    ‘Don’t worry, Granddad, we’re not going to kill him just yet. We’re just going to hurt him.’ She smiled. ‘A lot.’
    Without warning, she rammed and twisted the stun-gun hard between Gregori’s legs.
    And fired.
    A hiss of compressed air. A dull thud.
    Gregori’s face froze like a mask, then contorted in agony as he started to writhe.
    Animal.
    Valentin fought the urge to try to tear himself free from his bonds. Instead of being manacled, like the others, he was still hog-tied. If he tried to tear himself loose, he would fail, he knew. And in so doing he would give away his recovery.
    Slowly, he commanded himself. Do not let these
sooki
see, but now slowly test what you can do. So he tried. And, yes, right there, he felt his wrists turning, twisting one against the other, probing at their bindings, trying to break free. Not long now, he told himself. A few more minutes and you’ll be strong enough to fight.
    As his wrists continued their hidden dance, his eyes searched desperately for some kind of a blade or sharp surface to speed matters along.
    I will not quit. I will not surrender hope.
    A shriek of duct tape.
    A gargling of blood and air.
    ‘Anything,’ Gregori screamed. ‘Anything. I will tell you anything you want to know.’
    Before Valentin could stop himself, he reacted. He could not help himself. He twisted right round to face Gregori: if the younger man talked, they were all doomed. These people would butcher them like cattle. They’d have no reason to keep them alive.
    ‘Shut up,’ he shouted.
    The blonde moved so fast, he hardly saw her coming. But then she was on him again. On top of him. She bared her teeth. She rammed the stun-gun into his squirming groin, and Valentin wished then that he was still gagged. If he had been gagged, then at least he would not scream.
    But it was the girl who screamed first.
    She was jerked backwards. But, even then, she refused to let go. Her nails clawed blood from his neck. The hawk-faced man gripped the scruff of her neck. Then he pressed a pistol to her head. Eventually she became still.
    ‘Not yet,’ he told her, soothingly now. ‘I have a much better use for him first.’
    Valentin’s hope almost deserted him. The way the hawk-faced man had spoken . . . The look in his eyes . . . The way even the woman – this bitch – now looked sated by his words . . . He knew then that whatever the hawk-faced man was promising her, it was going to be so much worse than death.

CHAPTER 7
PRIPYAT, UKRAINE.
    Hunting.
    That was what this reminded Danny Shanklin of, the pounding of blood in his veins, the thickening of spit in his mouth. It had got him thinking back to when the Old Man used to take him hunting in the woods.
    Danny had been a kid when his father had taught him how to kill, first with slings and bows, then with firearms. Many years later, after Danny’s parents had passed away and he’d finally plucked up the courage to set about clearing out his childhood home, he’d found a faded Polaroid that the Old Man had kept tucked inside his Bible in his bedside drawer.
    It had pictured Danny swamped in a camouflage jacket way too big for his skinny body, leaving him looking like a scarecrow, with his scruffy blond hair all messed up like straw, his knees and elbows sticking out. He’d been grinning, proudly holding up a dead wood pigeon. The bird had been shot clean through the head, mid-flight. An inch-perfect kill.
    The Old Man had been a soldier, just as Danny would later become. Hunting had been in his blood and he’d wanted his boy raised the same. He’d taught him to trap and shoot small game, then skin, pluck and gut his kills for food. But the first time Danny had ever tracked, stalked and shot something as big as himself, it had been a deer.
    Fleetingly, in his mind’s eye, he now saw the young deer again. A stag, skin the colour of raw liver. It had been standing silhouetted against a blood-red sky,